The bombshell news that Amazon MGM have now taken over creative control of the James Bond franchise has led to plenty of concerns about what that means for Bond’s future. For Daniel Craig, though, the last actor to play Bond, it was a moment to pay tribute to the Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who shepherded Bond to the big screen for more than 60 years.
“My respect, admiration and love for Barbara and Michael remain constant and undiminished,” Craig told Variety. “I wish Michael a long, relaxing (and well-deserved) retirement and whatever ventures Barbara goes on to do, I know they will be spectacular and I hope I can be part of them.”
Broccoli and Wilson will remain co-owners of the franchise alongside Amazon MGM, but Amazon MGM will now have creative control over the franchise’s future.
Craig played Bond for 15 years from 2006 to 2021, and there has been speculation ever since about what the future of the franchise might look like. Wilson has written scripts for some Bond films in the past but said he was now ready to retire from Hollywood at the age of 87. Broccoli, meanwhile, said that she will now focus on projects outside of the world of Bond.
Fans of the character and franchise, meanwhile, are apprehensive about what the future might look like now that Bond is controlled by a massive conglomerate. The franchise is one of the longest-running in the history of Hollywood, and part of what has made it unique is its control by a single family. Now, we could get a Bond TV show
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?